Post-grunge rockers Fuel have just released their latest CD, Natural Selection, and relied on Steinberg's Nuendo as a hard disk recorder for overdubs, as well as for all editing, comping and submixing.

“Pretty much every song had at least 100 tracks, all recorded at 24-bit/96k resolution,” said editor Fred Maher. “Nuendo was unquestionably the only DAW out there that could handle a project like this, and it ran flawlessly from start to finish.” Producer Michael Beinhorn concurred: “It’s the most flexible DAW system I’ve encountered for doing digital recording and editing.

“For a DAW-based system, Nuendo’s audio engine seems to be the best that I’ve heard; it’s really outstanding,” continued Beinhorn. “Michael and [engineer] Frank [Filipetti] are famous for being extremely picky about sound quality,” added Maher, “and about the effect of editing and processing on their tracks. When they were first auditioning Nuendo during the making of Korn’s Untouchables CD, as a test they had me take some multitrack files and do random editing—just cut them to ribbons—then piece them back together again using crossfades.

“Crossfading is something that different DAWs handle in different ways,” Maher continued, “but the way that Nuendo does it is superior. The drums on the Fuel album, for example, occupied at least 20 tracks, with both close mics and multiple pairs of room mics: close room mics, far room mics, pairs of overheads, pairs of mics behind the drummer. It was something that could have been a phase nightmare if everything wasn’t handled totally coherently by the editing process. When I finished the test edits, we did extensive A/B blind listening of both the edited files and the original source tracks, and we could not tell the difference at all pre- and post-editing. That was my moment of truth regarding the sound quality of Nuendo.”